Windows Phone: It's Still About the Apps

Last week I was in a cab with PCMag's mobile tech guru Sascha Segan, on the way to a meeting with Microsoft execs about new apps coming to the Windows Phone platform. Our cab driver overheard our discussion, and pulled out his Nokia Lumia 1020. That alone was indicitave that the platform has gone beyond theoretical and into the hands of real-world, regular people.

He had just one complaint about the best camera phone on the planet: "When is it going to get more apps?"

The phones themselves are top-notch—Nokia knows phone hardware, but as Segan noted this week on PCMag Live (below), "computing experiences aren't just what comes out of the box: They're social, they're about the things you see advertised around you; they're about the apps your friends and coworkers are using, and if your platform doesn't have that stuff, then you're the kid left out of the party."

For the most part, Windows Phone users are no longer left out of the conversation, with the number of big-name apps reaching critical mass. There are already official Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Kik, Skype, Foursquare, and Yelp apps, just to mention a few. The 6-second video sharing sensation Vine just hit the store last week, and Instagram just launched this week. A large selection of games is available for the phone, including popular casual favorites like Bejeweled, Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and Words With Friends, as well as more intense 3D titles like Assassin's Creed, Asphalt 8: Airborne, and Halo Spartan Assault.

YouTube is a much-discussed exception, but there are scads of unofficial YouTube apps for Windows Phone (like TubePro), most of which let you enjoy your subscriptions and discover viral videos. The one thing lacking from the official client is the ability to shoot and upload your own videos from within the app, but you can do that right from Windows Phone's built-in camera app. So the Windows Phone YouTube app brouhaha is really much ado about nothing.

The Problem Times are good if you're a Windows Phone user: The app your iPhone-flaunting friend is tapping on is probably now available to you or coming soon. But there's a catch: In nearly every case, you don't get 100 percent of the functionality you get on iOS or Android.

The Facebook app doesn't let you create a group or edit a post. Words With Friends doesn't let you purchase in-app extras. Vine doesn't let you rearrange or save subclips. The most glaring example of an app missing a feature was MLB At Bat, which doesn't include the Gameday view that shows you live pitches and results—you can even see this view in a Web browser, so why not in the app?

In the majority of cases, however, what's missing is far from essential. You can do the main bulk of what the app is for. You can still play Words With Friends games, you can still read and post to your Facebook newsfeed, you can still find a great nearby restaurant in Yelp. But the feeling of being a second-class citizen is unmistakable.

Another problem is that new apps come later. The iPhone gets apps first. Android users know about this. The hot new apps almost always appear on iPhones and iPads well before they're available for Galaxy and Droid devices. There's just something about building apps for iOS that appeals to developers. Perhaps it's that the coders know their app only has to work on one manufacturer's devices, perhaps it's the quality of the developer tools.

But the delay of new apps getting to Windows Phone far outdistances the move from iPhone to Android. Vine for Windows Phone appeared nearly nine months after its first release on iPhone. And we're still waiting for official Dropbox, Nook, and SnapChat apps.

It's Not All Bad Yes, the main premise of this column is that the Windows Phone versions of major apps almost always lack features and extras found in their Android and iPhone counterparts, but more often than not, the opposite is also the case. Many of the major apps take advantage of some unique Windows Phone capabilities, such as live tiles; you can often create tiles for particular app functions or users. Many can also take advantage of Windows Phone's Tap+share feature, which uses NFC for wireless phone-to-phone sharing. Photo apps can adjust ISO, aperture, and White Balance—something not possible in iOS.

The Windows Phone store has advantages over iOS and Android, too: An advantage over iOS is that you can remote-install apps from a browser on your desktop from a Windows Store link. An advantage over Android the app store is simply that there's one app store—Android's multiple sources of software make it the riskiest mobile OS from a security standpoint. A glance through our Security Watch Mobile Threat Monday posts should be enough to convince you of that. Over both competing phone OS's stores Windows Phone has the advantage of allowing trial installations of apps, in case you're not ready to pay.

Is There Hope? The big apps have arrived on Windows Phone for the most part. But will they get full functionality? That, of course, is up to the developers, but I'm optimistic about it, and here's why: Getting the app on the platform is the big hurdle, updating it to include a few extra goodies is a small task by comparison. One positive sign I'm seeing is that a good many of the apps I reviewed just a few weeks ago already have updates in the Store.

Windows Phone isn't going away: It's already topped 10 percent market share in the U.K., and it's passed Blackberry in the US. Market research firm Gartner even called it the winner of the quarter in its latest report, noting a 123 percent gain in shipments. That's nearly 9 million new users just in one quarter. Hopefully, that will be enough to spur the big mobile service to deliver the marquee apps—with all the features.

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services (pretty much the progenitor of Web 2.0) for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine’s Solutions section, which in those days covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software. Most recently he covered Web...
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